Why are some people wealthy while others are poor? To what extent can governments affect
inequality? Which instruments should they use? Answering these questions requires …

This survey discusses how capital should be taxed in advanced economies. We review the
theoretical optimal tax literature, survey empirical studies on the distribution of capital and …

How does wealth taxation differ from capital income taxation? When the return on
investment is equal across individuals, a well-known result is that the two tax systems are …

This paper develops a theory of optimal capital taxation that expresses optimal tax formulas
in sufficient statistics. We first consider a simple model with utility functions linear in …

We study the effect of subjective mortality beliefs on life‐cycle behavior. With new survey
evidence, we document that survival is underestimated (overestimated) by the young (old) …

Macroeconomics at the intermediate and graduate levels rests on three workhorses: the
Solow-Swan model, the overlapping generations (OLG) model, and the Ramsey model. The …

How does wealth taxation differ from capital income taxation? When the return on
investment is equal across individuals, a well-known result is that the two tax systems are …

Over the last 50 years the US tax system went through a striking transformation that reduced
the effective tax rates for top income groups and raised transfers to seniors. This paper …

While in the data wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small number of rich people and
the saving rate of the rich is high, many models used for quantitative policy evaluation fail to …

Ideal estimates of the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) in income require a large panel of
income data covering the entire working lifetimes for two generations. Previous studies have …